Apache ECharts vs Grafana
| Tagline | Powerful, declarative charting library for embedding interactive visualizations | Observability and analytics dashboards for metrics, logs, and time series |
| Category | BI & Dashboards | BI & Dashboards |
| Replaces | Tableau, Power BI | Tableau, Power BI, Datadog |
| GitHub stars | 67k | 77k |
| Language | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Simple | 2/5 Simple |
| Deploy options | Manual Docker | One-Click Docker Docker Compose Kubernetes Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | yesterday | yesterday |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Apache ECharts
- Library only; no built-in query layer or data connector UI
- Requires custom development to build a full dashboard application
- No user management or saved-dashboard persistence out of the box
Grafana
- Oriented toward time-series and observability, not ad-hoc business analytics or pivot-style exploration
- No business-friendly visual query builder; dashboards assume knowledge of data sources and query languages
- Weak at relational/tabular BI reporting compared to Tableau or Power BI
- No semantic modeling layer; data modeling lives in the underlying sources
Bottom line
Both are a similar lift to self-host; choose Grafana for the larger community and ecosystem. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
Apache ECharts
Powerful, declarative charting library for embedding interactive visualizations